Using a habitat affinity approach to assess restoration success
Grassland, Invertebrates, Restoration Scientists have presented an interesting method for measuring the success of ecological restoration. Eszter Deri and fellow researchers used a habitat affinity index to assess the progress of grassland restoration in Hortobagy National Park, the oldest and largest protected area in Hungary.
The basic concept of the habitat affinity approach is that it assesses the degree to which the species composition at a restoration site reflects that of the target habitat community.
The researchers tested the approach on insect communities in 1 and 2-year old restoration sites using cultivated lands and target grasslands as two ends of the succession timescale.
Individual species were given an ordinal ranking between -1 and 1. For example species characteristic of target grasslands were given a value of +1, habitat generalists were given a value of 0, and species associated with cultivated lands were given a value of -1.
The results from the study illustrate some of the advantages of the approach over more conventionally used metrics like species diversity.
While species richness was similar across sites, the habitat affinity score increased with age of restoration indicating a quick progression towards the target habitat.
"A strongly disturbed, early successional habitat, for example, can host a large number of pioneer and disturbance-tolerant species, while successional processes often involve a decrease in total species richness together with an increase in the richness of the taxa characteristic to the target habitats," the authors write.
Given the potential ability for habitat affinity indices to detect these succesional changes, the authors recommend that they be more widely used in helping to assess the success of ecosystem restoration.
--by Rob Goldstein
Déri, E., Magura, T., Horváth, R., Kisfali, M., Ruff, G., Lengyel, S., & Tóthmérész, B. (2010). Measuring the Short-term Success of Grassland Restoration: The Use of Habitat Affinity Indices in Ecological Restoration Restoration Ecology DOI: 10.1111/j.1526-100X.2009.00631.x
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